Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [140]
The 3-1 betting line in Hagler’s favor before the fight moved to 7-2 on fight night, November 10, 1983. The champion had won fifty-seven and drawn two of his sixty-one bouts, with forty-eight stoppages. A stellar line-up of former champs were introduced before the bout: Jake LaMotta, Kid Gavilan, Gene Fullmer, Carmen Basilio, Joey Maxim. The judges chosen by the WBA committee and Elias Cordoba were Guy Jutras of Canada, Ove Oveson of Denmark, and Yasuku Yoshida of Japan. The crowd dripped in wealth. Fifteen-dollar Duran T-shirts easily outsold Hagler shirts. Buglers blared the entry of the boxers, Duran to the Rocky theme tune, Hagler to “Stars And Stripes Forever.”
The preliminaries were drawn out, with the boxers waiting in the ring for over twenty minutes in cool evening air, but Duran seemed to savor the atmosphere, bouncing around the ring and smiling. The combatants jawed at each other during pre-fight introductions, but seconds later they quickly touched gloves, a rarity for Hagler.
The chess match commenced at the opening bell. Even the casual fight fan could have predicted that the taller Hagler would use his reach advantage to good effect. Duran came in prepared, without the roll of body fat that occasionally surrounded his midsection. Hagler, one of the hardest trainers in the game, had his usual rocklike look.
Coming off thirty-two straight victories, Hagler landed the first significant punch when he sneaked an uppercut under Duran’s guard in the second round. Hagler landed it when he needed to. Often, Hagler set it up by placing his left glove on top of Duran’s head, and then sticking the right uppercut into the base of Duran’s beard. At the end of the initial stanza, Duran landed a straight right on Hagler’s temple, creating a response from the crowd as if it were performing the wave.
The bell ended the second round, and both fighters stopped throwing punches. In an unnatural move, Hagler curled up both gloves against his head to protect himself as the fighters separated. Instead of turning around and heading back to the corner or even throwing a punch after the bell to send a message, Hagler was more concerned with keeping his guard up. It became a theme of the evening.
Duran stepped around a huge Hagler left to start the third round, and delivered a compact left hook to the champ’s midsection. It didn’t hurt Hagler, but reminded the southpaw that he had everything to lose in the fight. Since Hagler wasn’t pressing, Duran was able to conserve his energy, and that was never a good sign for any of his opponents. Both fighters would tease the crowd with a brief middle-of-the-ring duel toward the end of the third, but then Hagler responded to his inner clock.
In the fifth, Duran injured his right hand, which began to swell between the first and second knuckles down to his wrist. Yet he never once gave away his injury, not even grimacing as he continued to land full-blooded rights to Hagler’s shaven skull. Gutsing it out, he dismissed the pain to open up in the final fifteen seconds of the fifth. First, he nailed Hagler with a straight right as the southpaw was throwing a jab. Then in one beautiful sequence, Duran closed the gap and landed a right to the body and left hook to the head.
Perhaps because booing had started around the arena, Hagler came alive in the sixth. He shot his jab into Duran’s face, switched from southpaw to orthodox and back again – he could box equally as well in either stance – and landed a hard left hook. After a Duran right harmlessly bounced off his shaven skull, Hagler shot an effective right cross. Moving now with purpose, Hagler sunk in three left hooks to the body, pushed Duran against the ropes, reverted to southpaw, moved to the middle of the ring, turned conventional again and then banged Duran with a right cross that stunned him for the first time. It was the best punch of the fight. After motioning Duran